My son Bud asked me one night a few weeks back what they were saying
on the news.

"Not much real information," I told him. "I just turned
it on to see if there was anything worthwhile, but it's just people talking."

"Why do they do that?" Bud wanted to know. "If they don't
have any real news, why don't they just put up a picture of the American
flag and play music?"

Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, all the news is printed to fit, as I did my best to explain. There
are a certain number of newspapers printed every day and news magazines
printed every week. Television and radio news shows air for a specific
number of hours, selling a specific number of minutes of advertising,
and they have to keep going, or else maybe their listeners won't come
back when something really happens. And if their listeners don't come
back, their advertisers won't either, and then their advertising rates
will drop.

Or something like that. As Bob Dylan once sang, "A lot of folks
have a lot of forks and a lot of knives, and they gotta cut something."

Listen. This war on terrorism is going just fine. In fact, it's going
very well indeed. Here is the real information. There's not much of it,
but what there is is important. When I'm done, you can hoist the American
flag and play some music. That's what I'm going to do. (I've got a tough
saxophone part to master in Benny Goodman's "Let's Dance.")

The United States has deployed powerful military assets, fast, in the
region of Afghanistan, and brought our might to bear on Al Qaeda and the
Taliban. We have destroyed most of the Taliban's mechanized military equipment
- airplanes, trucks, armored personnel carriers, and tanks, of which there
were not many. We have destroyed most of their antiaircraft capability.
We can go anywhere we want to go and do just about anything we want to
do. Anything or anybody we can find, we can destroy. And we're getting
a whole lot closer to finding Osama bin Laden and the higher-ups of the
Taliban. The over-under on dead or alive for that bunch is three weeks.

Osama
bin Laden cannot communicate effectively with his followers. He can't
issue orders, he can't send money, he can't release materials of war to
them. He can't move, and he can't use a telephone or any other electronic
device. His followers were always spread extremely thin. Now they have
been cut off, isolated, and scattered by a combination of American military
actions in Afghanistan, the aggressive policing of suspects in Europe
and the United States and by the freezing of financial assets world-wide.

Without declaring so, the United States and our European allies have
suspended conventional civil rights for certain people, namely youngish,
unattached Middle Eastern men. We now arrest these men on no more evidence
than a policeman's hunch, which is generally pretty good. It's called
preventive detention. That detention (of more than 1,100 suspects in the
U.S. alone) has probably spared us another serious terrorist attack.

The best evidence for this? The puny propagation of anthrax. It is obvously
the work of a very few agents, perhaps even only one, and of agents, moreover,
who don't have much of the stuff - or are afraid to disseminate any more
of it any more widely. The more letters, the more clues.

Attorney General John Ashcroft's vague, if emphatic, warnings of potential
terrorist attacks in fact confirm how well we're doing. He can't say this,
but I can; it's the best guess: We have thoroughly penetrated the communications
channels of world-wide terrorist organizations. We have not decoded the
content of those channels. But we can monitor the volume and direction
of traffic, which offer significant clues. That signals volume is what
Ashcroft means by a "credible threat."

We have no human intelligence assets in Afghanistan, but we knew that
going in. The Northern Alliance is a weak, underarmed clutch of bandits,
not dependable, and not especially motivated, and we can't count on them.
We suspected this might be the case; now we know it. No matter. Our Special
Forces' initial expeditions will be to carry laser bomb sites (they're
already doing it; thus the daisy cutter), which will make our targeting
of Taliban and Al Qaeda assets even more accurate. We'll do some man-to-man
fighting, but only that necessary, and that will work flawlessly.

Iraq? We'll get to it. For now, the administration is soft-pedaling what
they know about the anthrax situation because of a long-standing U.S.
policy: that we will respond to weapons of mass destruction with a nuclear
attack. James Baker told that to Iraqi foreign minister Tareq Aziz during
the Gulf War. There's no need to repeat it - not just yet.

World politics (i.e., "nation-building") can come later. Right
now, our business is to fight, and we're doing that quite well.

Don't believe me? Every two weeks or so, Henry Kissinger writes something
extremely sensible and realistic in the Washington Post. His latest appeared
November 6.

Read Henry the K. Take it easy. No enemy can stand up to the might of
an aroused democracy. Take a deep breath.